Epilogue: A Requiem For Three Parts
by LilLolaBlue
Summary: And they all lived Happily Ever After? Did you buy the Epilogue in DH? Me neither. After what Harry, Ron and Hermione went through, this is more like it. DH compliant, except...Snape lives! HG/SS/RW, no slash, HP/GW. Special Guest Draco Malfoy.
1. Prelude

**EPILOGUE – A REQUIEM FOR THREE PARTS**

NINETEEN YEARS AFTER THE FINAL BATTLE…

Harry Potter looked across his desk in the Auror Department at the Ministry at the chair on the other side.

Draco Malfoy was sitting there, in Ron's chair.

Harry didn't feel about Draco they way he had when they were kids, they'd both long since awakened to the fact that they both got fucked in the war, despite who was on what side, or who won.

Still, he wasn't Malfoy's best mate, or anything like that, so it was both annoying and depressing to see him in Ron's chair while Ron was out on sick leave.

Again.

They were working on a case together, that of a schoolmate of theirs, Dennis Creevey. Harry and Ron had investigated him for a series of grisly murders. First, he'd tortured his victims with the Cruciatus Curse, then killed them with the Death Curse.

Not a nice way to go.

Not a nice way to go, at all.

Harry and Ron had investigated Dennis, and it was up to Malfoy to prosecute. But, the Office of Magical Law had decided to let Dennis temporarily plead out on an insanity rap, and he'd be off to St. Mungo's until such time as he was sane enough to stand trial.

Dennis' victims had all been witches and wizards who were brothers or sisters of people who'd fought in the last battle. On both sides; those kinds of distinctions didn't matter to Dennis.

He had never quite gotten over Colin's death, and for whatever reason, after sitting on himself for nearly twenty years and brooding over his brother, he just went around the bend.

Unfortunately, dredging up all those bad old memories sent Ron around the bend, too. He was fundamentally okay, Ron was, but every once in awhile he went round the twist, too, and had to spend a couple of weeks or so at St. Mungo's, himself.

Ron was a good auror and a good man, and after what he'd been through, nobody really faulted him for it.

Around the Department, they just called it Ron's "Sick leave."

"Do you want me to sit in a different chair, Potter?" Malfoy asked,

"Naaah. Bum a fag, Malfoy?"

"Here. I suppose I should go see Weasley."

"I'm going tonight. I'll send him your regards."

"So…will you be at the WAND meeting, later?"

Harry looked at Draco over his glasses.

He had his little sick leaves, too.

Harry was a recovered junkie and a functional alcoholic. He attended Wizards Against Narcotics and Drinking for his addictions to the powerful wizarding drug Purple Doom, heroin, and to the injectable mixture thereof, Dragon's Fire.

He'd started chasing the dragon about three months after the Final Battle, and it was a long, hard decade before Harry realised he had to quit. He'd been sober for nine years, except for a brief relapse about five years ago. Those were hard times. Ginny threatened to leave him for good. Since then, he'd attended WAND meetings three days a week, instead of one.

Except when Ron was at St. Mungo's.

Then, he spent the time with Ron.

"No. You can tell Our Undead Fuehrer that I'll be there on Saturday night."

Twenty years on, Snape, who had escaped death at the final battle via some anti-venom and blood replenishing potions that were among those the paranoid son of a bitch always carried with him, seemed largely unchanged by time and turmoil.

Pushing sixty, not so old for a wizard, he had gone a bit grey at the temples, but otherwise he was substantially the same man who had terrorised their childhoods at Hogwarts.

The wicked old screw had left his teaching post and gone into business for himself, making a mint selling his patented potions. He and his business partner, Hermione Grainger, owned a lab, a distribution centre and a shop in Diagon Alley, called The Serpent and Gryphon. They employed an army of SPEW- liberated house elves as workers who were sworn to secrecy about the potions manufactured by Snape-Grainger Industries, Co.

They lived a rather reclusive existence in a magical townhouse located between their factory/warehouse/lab and shop.

Ron lived there, as well.

Hermione and Ron had been married for about five years, and then they divorced, and she moved in with her partner at his townhouse. Then, about a year later, Ron moved in, too.

Hermione re-married him, and then she took Snape as her second husband and Ron accepted Snape as his brother by law

What went on behind closed doors during Ron and Hermione's first marriage, or Hermione's apprenticeship with old Snape, nobody really knew, but, just like Harry's drinking and Ron's temporary lapses of reasoning, because of the Great War, because they were War Heroes, nobody said anything.

Neither Harry, nor Ron, nor Hermione had any children.

Snape was also Harry's sponsor at WAND, a member since 1980, and chairman of the London chapter. If he didn't come to WAND meetings, Snape came to 12 Grimmauld Place to get him. He had the idea the old bastard wanted him to quit drinking, as well. Harry had periods where he drank less, but he didn't think he could face the world sober, like Ron did.

He'd end up spending a lot more time in the Happy Hut than Ron did.

He'd be there full time, like Dennis Creevey.

* * *

After work that day, Harry made his usual trip to the pub. Without Ron there, he drank more than he should have.

He drank his way through visiting hours at St. Mungo's, but that didn't stop him from stopping to get a fifth of Hell's Horntail firewhiskey on his way.

Only the best for Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived to Defeat Voldemort.

It was not an uncommon sight at St. Mungo's, Harry Potter showing up after hours drunk and raving, demanding to see Ron Weasley.

Ron and his sister, and Harry's guardian, were what kept the functional in the description of Harry as an alcoholic, without his best friend and partner and his wife's constant support, Harry went off the rails fairly quickly.

So when he showed up brandishing an empty fifth of firewhiskey with mud and grass stains all over his robe, they did what they usually did.

Wheeled a cot into Detective Weasley's room, sent a house elf to fix Detective Potter some dinner and left Harry stay overnight.

It was a welcome change for Ron. He didn't like being sick or being fussed over, and it gave him a chance to fuss over someone else instead.

"Oh no, Harry! Not again!" Ron cried.

He got up out of the chair he was sitting in, and helped Harry out of his soiled robe and into some comfy St. Mungo's PJ's.

A house elf showed up with food, coffee and a sober-up potion for Harry.

Harry called him Dobby.

Harry called all house elves Dobby when he was drunk.

The house elf didn't mind.

After he left, Ron got Harry to sit down and drink and eat.

"I went to see Sirius today. Then Tonks. And Lupin. It was just like old times. I had to tell Remus and Tonks how Teddy's doing at Hogwarts. When I get al'le drunker'n this, I'll go see Good ol' Dumbledore. So nice to see everybody, again."

Ron looked over at Harry's robes and his shoes, all covered with graveyard mud.

He buzzed the house elf to come back and get Harry's robes to take them to the laundry.

"That's good, Harry. I'm, erm, getting out tomorrow. I'll be back to work on Monday. The healers have adjusted my potions, and I'm feeling much better. Who knows, it might just be another year and a half before I have to come back here. Unless I need a vacation from Snape before that." Ron joked.

"Coming back to work on Monday?"

"Yeah. Just can't wait."

Ron was hoping Harry wasn't going to break down, but he did, putting his face in his hands and weeping.

Ron put his arms around his friend, and Harry cried on his shoulder.

"Don't say you wish you were dead, Harry. I hate it when you say that."

"I can't help it, Ron. I should have died with Voldemort. I never wanted to come back. I don't know why Dumbledore didn't let me go with him. To the next world, with my parents and my friends. He used me all my life and when it was over, he couldn't even let me die. He had to send me on to twenty years and counting, un-dead. I'm a ghost, Ron. I'm not really here." Harry sobbed.

"Well, I can't say I agree with you, Harry. Ginny and I and Hermione, we love you, and we need you. It's always better to be alive, than dead." Ron volunteered.

"I'm just gonna lie down. Maybe if I get some sleep." Harry said.

After Harry fell asleep, Ron went to the St. Mungo's owlery, to send an owl home to tell Hermione and Snape that Harry's train was going off the tracks.

Again.

* * *

Ron and Harry both hoped that Hermione would be the one to meet them at the door in the morning, and both their hearts sank a little when they saw Snape signing all the appropriate papers.

Snape was very civil to Ron.

After all, they were brothers by law, and they lived together, so they had to get along.

"Hermione and I will mix your new potions personally, Ron. I hope you're feeling better." He said, as they walked into the cloudy March day in wizarding London.

"You can get the house elves to do it, Severus." Ron suggested.

"Hermione wouldn't hear of it. Do you know she actually cleaned her bedroom in expectation of your coming home?"

"Did she? Blimey!"

Hermione was a rotten housekeeper. Snape's house elf, Treacher, and Ron's, Winky, an old friend of Dobby's, did most of the housework, and most of the time that was alright with Hermione. Sometimes, however, she got a Betty Crocker bug up her arse, and Snape and Ron had to endure a few days of burnt food, dirty dishes, and, if she did the laundry, mismatched underwear.

Snape and Harry walked home with Ron, and, smoothly, Snape saw him in and continued on his way.

"Let's go get some breakfast, Potter." He suggested.

Harry didn't know how he did it. Ron most likely went to find Hermione and immediately took her to her clean bedroom to shag the arse off her. And Snape didn't seem to care. Likewise, how could Ron sleep at night in his bedroom when he knew Hermione might be in Snape's?

Not that he had room to talk. He had been unfaithful to Ginny a million times over, until he'd gotten clean.

Harry waited until they were at the Leaky Cauldron to start on Snape's least favourite subject.

"So, Dad, how about we get the lecture over with."

"Potter, I am not your biological father, for the millionth time."

"Bullshit. I have a mirror. And a brain."

"Really? You should use both more often. You look awful, and you ought to be higher up in the Auror Department than detective."

"We're both tall."

"James was tall."

"We both have black hair."

"James had black hair."

"You wear contacts."

"Most people wear contacts or eyeglasses."

"You chased the dragon. I chased the dragon. You were a drunk. I…"

"Yes. You are a drunk."

"You've got a mean temper. I've got a mean temper."

"So do a lot of wizards and witches. And Muggles. Especially old soldiers. Everything you've said amounts to nothing."

"Oh yeah? Who tutored me so I could take my NEWT's? Severus Snape. Who helped me get into university? Severus Snape. Who did Ginny know to call when I was strung out, fucked-up, passed out or otherwise in a bad way? Severus Snape. Who talked me into the Auror academy when I really blew it? Severus Snape. Who got me into rehab? Severus Snape. Who's my sponsor at WAND? Severus Snape. Who nags me the most about my drinking, and my position at the ministry, and even the state of my robes? Severus Snape. Who did I live with from the time I was 17 pretty much until I was thirty? Severus Snape. Who did my mother trust with my life? Severus Snape. Who's my father, by law and magical bond? Severus Snape. Why would a Slytherin bastard like Severus Snape stick his neck out for anybody unless there was something in it for him? Something like preserving his son's life?"

"Potter, everyone who could possibly have looked after you in life was dead by the time you were seventeen. You didn't think so then, but you were still only a boy, and you needed someone to look after you. I loved your mother, she was my best friend, and I could do nothing to prevent her death. I owe Lily. I also owe you, as much as I hate to admit it, you got ride of Tom Riddle and made me a free man. And I looked out for you since you were ten years old; I was the only person to see you as anything more than a pawn in the chess match between Tom Riddle and Albus Dumbledore. Not because I'm your father, because I was one, too." Snape replied.

"I'm going to take this coffee cup, Snape, and I'm going to deliver it to my Muggle liason with MI5, and have her run DNA tests on it. Then we'll see."

"Why don't you put your money where your mouth is, Potter?" Snape suggested.

Harry had been threatening Snape with DNA tests for at least ten years.

After the war, Snape had petitioned the Ministry to become Harry's legal guardian, something the Dursleys did not contest, based on a letter Lily Potter wrote that was to be opened only after the death of Voldemort.

It asked that in the even something happened to her and James that, whenever it was safe to do so, that their son be put in the joint care of Sirius Black, and, surprisingly, Severus Snape, who she described as her oldest friend and as "the Wizarding World's secret champion."

The Ministry did as Lily wished, and Harry lived at first in a room in the dungeons with Snape, next door to his apprentice, Hermione Grainger. Harry spent the holidays at the Snape-Prince family home in Liverpool, and was surprised to find not only were Snape's infamous parents alive, they had sobered up, and lived in the home of Severus and Aphrodite Lovegood Prince, Snape's grandparents, all in the same big, draughty old Victorian house.

The Snape-Prince family treated Harry like one of their own, and Snape formally adopted Harry when Harry was 19.

When Snape left Hogwarts and he and Hermione started their business, Harry was just beginning to get a serious habit. They employed him as a potions lab technician, and he lived in the townhouse next to the factory with Snape. He left home, though, broke up with Ginny, and spent the next two or three years pissing his money away, ignoring his real friends and turning 12 Grimmauld Place into a flop for junkies.

When he bottomed out, Snape came to his rescue. He paid off Harry's debts, had the Black family manor cleaned and refurbished, and got Harry into rehab and WAND, and then the Auror Academy.

Until Harry was thirty, he lived with Ginny whom he managed to reconcile with, his adoptive father, Ron, and Hermione in the townhouse. Then, when he and Ginny got married, he moved to 12 Grimmauld Place, which was about twenty minutes walking distance of the townhouse.

But Snape wouldn't cop to it. And Harry wouldn't go through the analysis.

In the end, he supposed, he really didn't want to know.

* * *

After breakfast, Snape made sure his adopted son went straight to work, then he dropped in on his daughter-in-law at 12 Grimmauld Place and discovered Arthur Weasley was there, pet-sitting.

Ginny was out hunting for a new job. A lioness animagus who loved a good scrap, she had been peculiarly suited to wartime and had struggled ever since to find a lasting position in the peace-time economy.

Arthur and Severus were related by a complex network of magical and legal ties, since one of Arthur's sons was Snape's brother-by-law and his daughter was Snape's daughter-in-law through his adopted son by law and magical bond.

They preferred, however, to interact as friends.

Arthur was in a state of distress; Ginny had called him in the morning and asked him to pet-sit for Harry's owl, Albus, and her lion, Fred.

Arthur was glad to hear that Harry had spent the night with Ron in his hospital room, and that Ron had gotten safely home with his brother-by-law.

Arthur worried about Ginny, and her restlessness, but she liked to change jobs every now and then, she'd stopped getting into bar fights, well, stopped getting into bar fights much, and she was settled in and married to Harry. Also, Ron's mental state was much improved, the calmer waters of his thirties and the settling of his domestic affairs also seemed to bring him some peace.

Hermione worked too hard, but Hermione had always worked too hard.

Rather like her second husband, she was a rock; neither the years nor the tragedies of the past seemed to have changed her much.

Arthur was the most worried about Harry, and so was Snape, and he dominated their conversation.

"Perhaps if I had done more for the boy. Maybe Lily should have picked a better man to be his guardian."

"More? Like what? Daily blood transfusions? Poor Harry was in a wretched state after the Great War. And everyone wanted to celebrate the Boy Who Lived, but no one wanted to pick up the pieces of Harry Potter, who had lost his childhood, all of his family, and most of his friends, teachers, and mentors. No one but you. You put Harry back together with sweat and blood, Severus, your own sweat and blood. You supported him through horrors that I've seen natural parents disown their children for. They all suffered, but Harry suffered the most and that's probably why he's the most fragile. Not because of you."

"I did not teach him from a boy of ten or raise him from a lad of seventeen to be fragile, Arthur. He's not fragile. If he was fragile, he would have died in the ring with the dragon at the Triwzard Tournament before he ever faced Tom Riddle. No, Harry is crafty, and lazy and sneaky. He could quit drinking, if he wanted to, and he could quit feeling sorry for himself, but he fancies himself a Romantic, Byronic hero and he likes the attention he gets. He's trying to manoeuvre me into an untenable position and I won't do it, so he'd trying to punish me by wasting himself." Snape disagreed.

"He's not the only one. Ron tells me he's turned down two offers for promotion because the Ministry doesn't want to promote his partner. Oh, the Auror Department knows that Harry's one of the best they have. They just don't feel they can rely on him. Even with Ron's troubles, they have more faith in him than in Harry. I keep telling Ron if he took the promotion that would stir Harry to get himself together, but he won't do it. He thinks it would have the opposite effect." Arthur commented.

"No doubt about it, Arthur, they'll have to go together or stay where they are." Snape observed.

"Maybe we should have an Intervention."

Snape had been thinking the same thing, but he didn't want to put Harry through it. He didn't want to put himself through it, either. Or Ron. Or Hermione. She hadn't rested at all after her last "miscarriage." For a bosomy girl with wide hips who was healthy as a horse, she certainly seemed to be prone to miscarriages.

Five of them, since she was 20.

"I'll talk to Hermione and Ron. You talk to Ginny. I'll send you an owl when I know more." Snape said.

He got up, lit a cigarette and walked out into the street.

"Ron and I have some rights don't we? I suppose not. I'm no good with children, anyway. Perhaps I am dead, Lily, and this is Hell. And I'll never see you again." He muttered, as he walked home.

It was time to get back to work.


	2. First Movement

**Chapter Two: First Movement**

Harry always felt weird going to work without Ron.

It wasn't that his fellow Aurors at CAULDRON didn't like him. The young ones and the rookies, they idolised him. But, aside from his Lieutenant, Lee Jordan, and Ron, none of them really knew him. He was Harry Potter, the Living Legend to them, and that made him uncomfortable.

He couldn't figure it out. Like the man who raised him, Harry made no bones about being a hard man, who'd led a hard life of hard-living. He knew he was a drunk, and he had been a junkie, and he and his wife had almost divorced several times over their infidelities until they declared it a semi-open marriage. Sex was okay, emotional commitments were a no-no.

But they still idolised him. They were too young to realise that there was nothing cool about being a hard and violent man with an unpleasant past littered with bar fights, battles, funerals for friends, lost years, bad breaks and dirty needles.

Not to mention a present besmirched by blackouts and bar brawls, still.

He opened his locker and removed a fresh bottle of Hell's Horntail. Harry had money, more money than he knew what to do with, enough money to quit his job and buy quality firewhiskey, but Harry was partial to the rotgut swill he'd been drinking since he was a teenager. Hell's Horntail and St. George's Dragon all the way.

It was cheap and he liked it, and you could use it to clean and polish your broomstick, as well.

Harry took a long, fortifying swig, filled up the flask he kept in his robes, put the bottle away and closed his locker.

And there they were. Fresh out of the academy. Nice kids somewhere between two and five years out of Hogwarts, kids who were toddlers during the war and had grown up in intact families in peaceful times.

Over the years, Harry had learned not to be cruel to them.

"Detective Potter, is it true what they say about your tattoo?"

"Partly. I had it done by the goblins in a 24 hour marathon session. The idea did come to me in a dream. But I was far from sober. I showed up with four bottles of St. George's Dragon and my works. They had two goblins tattooing me and two shooting me up with Dragon's Fire every four hours. When I wasn't in a Doom Trance, I was pouring firewhiskey down me throat. That's how I could withstand the pain. I was so high I can vaguely remember getting it."

"Can we see it, anyway?"

That's what they were after all along.

Harry was good-natured about it.

"Sure. I have to put me uniform robes on, anyway."

Harry took off his tee shirt and his jeans, exposing most of his tall, wiry body. He was one of those blokes who was tall and thin and sinewy and strong as an Ox, although lately he was beginning to look a little drawn and scrawny, like his rotgut hooch was eating him up alive.

The elaborate tattoo of a phoenix in flight, specifically Fawkes, took up most of his chest. It was extremely detailed and lifelike, and the glowing trail of red, yellow and orange flames that Fawkes rose out of and was enveloped in began on Harry's thigh and wrapped all the way around his body.

Above Fawkes' head was a perfect representation of the sword of Godric Gryffindor, and in his claws he held a scroll emblazoned with and Elvish verse in Elvish script that glowed a with the same silvery-blue fire as the sword.

Cryptically, the scroll read "Live in Pain, Die in Flame, Rise Again."

"Cor! You can see the fire glowing. And it looks like the phoenix is flapping his wings!"

"That's because the goblins don't use regular ink like Muggle tattoos. A goblin tattoo is a combination of a special, personal, protective charm, and a living thing. Try and hit me. Where the fire is."

One brave rookie raised his hand, and when it got close enough to the flames on Harry's side, his hand felt hot.

"Does the phoenix attack?" one asked.

"Is your sword sharp?"

The second one, Fletcher, he thought her name was, she was a pretty little witch.

_You bet my sword is sharp, luv_, he found himself thinking

"That's why his beak is right over me heart and his wings and the sword protect me chest. It won't stop a spell, but it works like a charm on sharpened screwdrivers, knives, and guns. Better than a bulletproof vest."

"Guns are Muggle weapons." The first one said, dismissively.

"You see this scar here? On my shoulder? That's from a bullet. A Muggle-born wizard shot me, standing closer to me than you are now. With a .45 caliber, hollow-point slug. That's' a fucking big nasty bullet. It shattered me collarbone here, and left the big insulting hole you see here on the way out."

Harry turned around, to reaveal a large round scar where the exit wound had been.

"Go ahead, put your finger in it."

None of them were brave enough to take him up on it.

"I had to go to a Muggle hospital because our healers don't know much about bullets. I almost bled to death, and it hurt like a motherfucker. There's no spell to stop a bullet. And Muggles aren't the only ones with guns."

Harry began to put on his uniform as the rookies dispersed.

Office Fletcher hung around.

"Will "Expelliarmus" work on a gun?"

"Sure. It'll work on anything that anybody has in their hand. So will "Stupefy". I'm not sure if a Patronus stops a bullet, but it does give you enough time to run away from a knife, or something like that.

"Have you been knifed too, Detetective Potter?"

"Luv, I've been shot, stabbed, hit with a piece of pipe, and had my fingers smashed with a hammer. I've fallen out a two story window and I've either been beat to a puland beat more punters to a pulp than I can remember. I've had both of the Unforgivables that you can live through, and any number of curses, hexes, spells and potions. I've had every possible influction of GBH on me person that a man could have. But I'm still here, and that's all that counts." Harry observed.

Officer Fletcher looked impressed, but not quite impressed enough that if he asked if she wanted to go have a drink with him later, she'd say yes.

Oh, well. He'd have to work on her, save her up for the next time Ginny was out of town.

* * *

Harry worked late that night.

Ginny wasn't home, and he didn't like being at home alone.

Too many memories.

His mind wandered a little, waiting for a return owl in the owlery, so he went back to his and Ron's office.

It was about time to let the house elves in to clean up. The place looked like a bomb had hit it.

Harry sat in his chair, and looked across at Ron's empty desk at wondering what Ron would say if he was there.

Well, Harry didn't want a fucking promotion. All he'd wanted from his life since he was a kid was to live long enough to qualify for the Central Advanced Unit for Limiting Dark Rites and Orders Nationwide, or as it widely known in the Wizarding World, CAULDRON.

Not only had he reached that goal, he was a Detective in the High Magical Crimes division, which gave him the right to use the Unforgivable Curses in affairs connected to his work.

Typical Snape. I'm James Bond and he's not happy because he thinks I should be M.

Harry knew that "but I'm a good agent" was a cliché and it didn't excuse his drinking or any of his other problems, but Harry didn't want to be sober and he wasn't interested in promotions.

He opened his desk drawer, in which he had a plastic baggie containing a cigarette butt of Snape's.

He got out the cell phone he used to contact his liason at MI5, and put one of his own cigarette butts into another evidence bag.

"Hello, Detective Dennis? This is Potter. I know what fucking time it is, Shirley, what are you doing still at work …I'm at work, too. My wife's away dong some job thing…no that would be unprofessional…that's different we were both of us drunk and it was New Year's…well I hope you're not joking, I might have to take you up on that someday. Anyway I'm going to send you that evidence I want to test…Yes, I really want to know…a man should know who his father is, shouldn't he…tell you what, why don't we meet in person. You sound like you could use a drink."

After he left the pub with Detective Dennis, Harry was too drunk to walk to the nearest public apparition point, so Shirley had to drive him home in her car.

She didn't know how to find his home address, but she had clearance to get into the CAULDRON offices, and so she helped Harry back into his office.

There was a couch there with a whole lot of garbage piled up on it, so Detective Dennis moved the empty bottles and take-away cartons over to what appeared to be a rubbish bin, got Harry in a prone position, took off his boots and covered him up with a blanket she found in a cupboard.

Then she drove home.

Detective Dennis agreed with him that something was fishy about the Creevey case and that the explanation of why a wizard seeking revenge on other wizards for the death of his brother in a wizard's war would kill four ordinary citizens didn't hold water.

She was worried, however that neither her superiors or Harry's would take his word for it because he was beginning to better known for his drunkenness than his work.

* * *

When Harry woke up in the same clothes he'd been wearing all weekend early on Monday morning in his office after living there since Friday, he didn't panic.

He summoned Kreacher and Treacher, Snape's long since freed but still loyal house elf to clean up. He swore the brothers to secrecy, and went down to the locker room where he took a shower and had a double draught of Weasley's Super Strength Sober Up, and then a double draught of Weasley's Wild Wake Up.

Snape and Hermione both told him that George had no Potions degree and that he should use their potions instead, to be on the safe side, but Harry had been using the Weasley's Sober-Up and Wake-Up draughts since Fred was still alive, and he swore by them.

By 9AM when Ron came to the office Harry looked as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as if he'd gone to bed early the night before with a glass of warm milk.

The office was spotless.

"You were here all weekend, weren't you?" Ron said after the door was shut and the office was warded and silenced.

"Yeah. And this Creevey case still doesn't make sense to me. Shirley doesn't like it either. There's something we're missing."

"I get the same feeling. We'll just have to go over all the files again. And retrace our steps. Start from scratch."

Harry always sent his own house elf to the file room; he never used CAULDRON elves. And he always kept his office, his locker and every drawer in his desk and file cabinet warded and silenced.

With different passwords.

As Snape had once told him, paranoia is not a virtue in the intelligence business, it's a necessity.

And, like Snape and even moreso than Ron and Hermione, Harry had paranoia in spades.

* * *

Being Harry Potter's wife and a war hero herself, Ginny found she spent more time during job interviews fielding questions about what Harry was really like and what their life together was really like and so on than answering job-related questions.

The same story always came to mind when she got those kinds of questions, but she never told it, even though it was Harry to the core.

A few years back, some tabloid muckraker did an expose on Harry. It wasn't much of an expose, as Harry never attempted to hide his unconventional and hard-living ways.

They had both ignored it, and as the article contained nothing new, so did much of Wizarding England.

The reporter and his wife attended some CAULDRON function or the other, and he came up to Harry's table and stuck a self-inking parchment under his nose and asked him how he could sit there and pretend to be a pillar of the community and pose as the son of a great hero when he was really nothing but the illegitimate son of a known subversive degenerate from a degenerate branch of a fine Wizarding family who had grown up to be just as degenerate as his father, and half-crocked at the time.

Harry didn't appreciate that comment at all, and Ginny thought that he was going to give the reporter the story he wanted by beating the fuck out of him in front of most of the important people in Wizarding England.

Instead, Harry just smiled and spoke clearly and directly to the parchment under his nose.

"Sir, you really shouldn't have brought your wife with you to this interview. The poor woman is looking at me like I'm an ice cream on a hot day. There are five reasons why your poor wife is looking at me like that, and they are the same four reasons that you despise me. One, I am Harry Potter the Boy Who Lived to Beceome the Man Who Defeated Lord Voldemort, and you're not. Two, I'm a highly decorated CAULDRON agent and war hero. Three. I'm an honest man. I have never denied any claims on my name of past, present or future degeneracy, and I have been half-crocked since I was a lad of seventeen, just like most red-blooded Britons. Four, I'm a third degree Sex Magus. Five, I've got a cock thirteen and a half inches long that's as big around as a beer can. No matter how drunk I am, it has never failed me in the line of duty, and I know precisely how to use it. You are an insignificant, annoying, pasty-faced little piece of shit, and it would be beneath my dignity to do massive GBH on your nasty little person. I would, however, love to fuck your wife. If mine wasn't here with me tonight, I just might. Go away and take her with you, before I give her what she can never get from you. As for you, dear, if you ever want to have a decent shag in your life and really come your lot, you'd better divorce the likes of this one. That concludes my comment. You may go now."

Harry to the core.

Or at least it was, before Harry began paying more attention to St. George's Dragon and Hell's Horntail than he did to anything else.

Her Dad told her that Harry hadn't been home all week-end, and she wasn't surprised. Only she and Kreacher knew where to find Harry when he didn't come home.

She wasn't sure when he'd be home from work, or if, so she decided to take a bath before she and Kreacher went looking.

* * *

Fred, Ginny's rather large familiar, was in the yard when Harry came home that night, lazing under the tree where Albus was perched, so Harry knew that Ginny was home.

She hated to keep the animals cooped up in cages.

"Where are you?" Harry yelled into the cavernous recesses of his home.

"I'm taking a bath."

It seemed to Ginny that she had no sooner said "Bath" than was Harry right by the tub with his clothes half off.

She was happy to see him, happier to see him naked, and over the moon that the Firebolt, which was finally beginning to suffer the ravages of Harry's titanic piss artistry, looked suitable for riding.

"You're going to get water all over the floor again."

"So? Kreacher will clean it up. I've been a good boy all week. I waited for you. And I'm not going to wait one minute longer. Besides, this tub is big enough for three. I should know."

"There are three of us, Harry. You, me, and the Firebolt." Ginny joked.

Harry set his drink down on the rim of the tub and got in.

"Did you get the job?"

"Do you really care?"

"Do you?"

"No?"

"Then I don't either."

* * *

As he began preparing dinner, Kreacher heard glass breaking and water sloshing as well as other assorted sounds.

"…Perhaps Master is feeling better now? It sounds as though he might be getting back to his old self. Kreacher hopes that Master will stop drinking so much. Treacher says Master and Mistress Snape together don't make as much work for him as poor drunken master makes for his poor old Kreacher. And he has the Wheezy to look after, as well. Kreacher is going to ask for a helper if this keeps up. Kreacher will fix them all. He will join SPEW, and go to work in the Potions factory. Then maybe master will see how foolish he is being…"

The old elf complained, steadily until he heard his mistress calling for him.

"Kreacher! Kreacher! I hate to embarrass us both this way, but Harry has passed out on the job and I can't shift him off me!"

Kreacher apparated in the bathroom with a crack.

"Master has not died in the saddle, has he?" Kreacher cried, wringing his hands

Then Harry started to snore, letting them both know he was still alive.

"Kreacher will move Master and avert his eyes while Mistress puts on her dressing gown." Kreacher said, tactfully.

After Ginny had her bathrobe on, she and Kreacher dried Harry off and they carried him to his bed to rest before dinner.

"Kreacher is begging Mistress' pardon, but does Mistress really think that there is nothing wrong with Master Potter coming home drunk and passing out before dinner? Right in the middle of…er, well, Kreacher thinks Mistress should really think about these things."

Ginny closed the door and patted the embarrassed house elf on the shoulder.

"Mistress does, Kreacher. If Harry can't get his mojo working without passing out, disaster is not far behind. Will you be coming for the Intervention?"

"Kreacher would not dream of missing it."

* * *

Harry certainly saw the irony of attending WAND meetings after a few bevvies at the pub, but he credited himself for staying off smack and Purple Doom, so he was actually quite indignant when he came home from work and the gang, including the house elves, were all there in his parlour.

"Don't they have a programme on telly about this? Oh wait, that's for Muggles. But Muggles know me, because I work with MI-5! I've been on Muggle telly a few times. And at the very least you could have invited the Wizarding press! Snape, you really should have arranged for it. Harry Potter's intervention. You could have made a fortune."

"If I wanted to make money on your humiliating yourself, Potter, I would have started the first time I found you lying in a pool of blood and piss stinking of wormwood with a needle still stuck in a sore on your arm." Snape informed him.

That took some of the wind out of Harry's sails.

Snape pressed on, ruthlessly.

"You think everything's a big joke, don't you, Potter? You think you can just coast on the good name you forged when you were a whiny teenage brat, forever? You can't. You may be a good Auror, and one of the best agents CAULDRON has, but if you keep turning up drunk and unconscious with your cock hanging out of your piss-stained robes on every street corner, you are going to wear out your goodwill with the Wizarding World, and your superiors. While you've been boozing yourself stupid, I've been calling in favours. You're a niffler's whisker away from getting the sack. Having the name "Harry Potter" associated with their organisation is not as important to CAULDRON as the fact that the man attached to that name is only a brilliant Auror in the occasional flashes of sobriety he experiences between trips to his locker to fill up his flask. It's not cute, and it's not funny. Your act killed Keith Moon when he was playing it when you were trying to figure out what side of the playpen smelled the best. And at your age, you've no excuse for it. Make no mistake, you were a whiny teenage brat, Potter. You wouldn't have been able to be the great Harry Potter without all the people in this room helping you. If you don't want to sober up for your sake, do it for ours. We didn't save your life so that you could waste it on turning into a has-been piss artist living off his trust fund and doing the occasional self-aggrandising interview with the Daily Prophet. That's all I have to say. Who's next?"

"I'll drink if I fucking well want to, and you can't insult and bully me into quitting, you old tosser!" Harry rejoined, his voice quavery with approaching emotional Armageddon.

"Well, then, what do we have to do, Harry? How can we stop you? Look, I don't care about getting a promotion. I'm happy where we are, too. But you do seem to think your drinking is normal and that it's a big joke. It's not funny, anymore. You always say you're a functional alcoholic, and if your definition of functional is that you show up on time for work every day and don't throw up on your desk, I suppose you are. You're smarter than I am, Harry. And I don't mind. But sometimes I have to carry you. And now, with this Dennis Creevey thing, I think we've put the wrong wizard away, because I was spending more time covering for your drunkenness on the case than working the case. I can't live with that, Harry. And I can't solve this case on me own. Please. Kreacher, tell him about the bottles." Ron added.

"Kreacher knows it is not his place to say so. And Kreacher knows he has not always been kind to Master. But Kreacher counted all the bottles of Hell's Horntail in the rubbish bin last week and there were twelve. And Kreacher is not counting beer cans. And Kreacher does not know how much Master drinks when he is not home. Kreacher does not want to come to wake Master one morning and find Master cannot wake up. This is how young Master Black's father dies. It was a terrible sight. Kreacher did not mean for young Master Black to be killed. He did not think that Master Sirius kin would murder him. Kreacher has lost two Masters in terrible ways. He is old and he does not want to outlive another Master, especially not one who is as kind to him, perhaps kinder, than Master Regulus was. " The house elf confessed.

Harry didn't know what to say to that. He never thought about the effect his drinking had on poor old Kreacher, who was stuck looking after and picking up after his sorry arse. Twelve bottles, just at home? Could it really be that many? And he always prided himself on being a good Auror. One of the best. Despite his drinking.

Then again, Ron wouldn't lie, either.

"Ginny, I've not changed towards you, have I?" Harry asked.

"Harry, I love you. I know I've an odd way of showing it sometimes, and we've an unconventional marriage, but I do love you. And I was over the moon when you quit chasing the dragon. But since then, steadily, you've been drinking more , and more and now you're almost at the point where you were when you were shooting up. You come home, at all hours, drunk and incoherent and I'm lucky if I get a hello out of you before you pass out. Sometimes you don't come home at all. And I don't wonder who you're with, I wonder where you've passed out at. And Kreacher and I go around looking in all the usual places for you, and fetch what's left of you home. It was funny and like you said to that reporter when you were only half-crocked all the time. But you've gone far past that point. I'm afraid you're going to choke to death in your sleep at night, too. I never sleep through the night." Ginny confessed.

Harry started to get tears in his eyes.

"I have a confession to make, Harry. George hasn't been selling you Sober-Up for awahile now. He's been selling you a special potion Severus and I mixed for you to try and counter affect the damage you've been doing to your body, drowning it in that cheap rotgut poison. Do you know what they use to make Hell's Horntail, Harry? Besides barley? It's on the label, but I doubt you've read it. Let me read it to you. Belladonna, Dragon's Blood, Tincture of Wolfsbane in Toadstool Oil, and less than .005 Wormwood. It doesn't say so on the label, but they also include minute traces of strychnine and mercury in their refining process, to make it taste like the so-called good stuff. The rest are compounds we use very sparingly in potions for consumption, if at all, and wormwood isn't used in anything but absinthe and making Purple Doom. In large amounts there are poisons, Harry, in addition to the same alcohol content as vodka, which is a poison in it's own right. I did some research. If you are drinking between 12 and fourteen bottles of this swill a week, then you have been ingesting 23 liters of alcohol, a half of a gram of belladonna, ten grams of Dragon's Blood, five grams of wolfsbane in toadstool oil, a half of a gram of wormwood, enough strychnine to kill a small mouse, and enough mercury to cause toxic poisoning effects within the next six months. You'd be dead by now if it wasn't for the potion you drink every morning. It can't save you forever. If you keep drinking like this, then you are going to die." Hermione told him.

Seeing that Harry was on the verge of breaking down, Snape threw in the coup de gras.

"Oh, and there's one more thing, Potter. I got a letter from your colleague at MI5. It seems that the DNA tests their lab ran on the two English Oval butts you gave her conclusively prove that you and I are, as you have long suspected, one hundred per-cent father and son. I, of course, have known that since 1979. I would like to remind you that you are the sole heir to my line of the Prince family, and my only child, and likely to remain so, as my wife continues to have miscarriages. I was your mother's second husband and James Potter's brother-by-law and magical bond. When they died, I lost my wife, who was also my best friend, and a former enemy I was just beginning to think of as a brother. They gave their lives to save you. If you die in the squalid fashion that me and your grandparents barely escaped, then not only will I have lost my only son, but my first wife and my brother will have died for nothing. If you do that to me, and to James, and to Lily, you spoilt little shit, then Tom Riddle will be making a place for you beside him in Hell."

"Severus, I don't think you're supposed to be so mean to somebody at an intervention..."

"Shut your pie hole, Weasley! This isn't the bloody telly. You can't be nice to a hard-boiled son-of-a-bitch like Potter! Now you listen to me, Potter. I hope you enjoyed your last drink, because it was your last drink. I'm not sending you to rehab. Fat lot of good it did you last time. They sent you back a drunk. You're coming with me lad, and you're going to spend 30 days doing the jobs at the factory that the house elves farm out to the trolls. I'm going to sweat it out of you, boy, the hard way, and then you are going right back to work on the 31st day. WAND meetings daily for the next six months. And if you so much as eat a liquor chocolate you had better use your Licence to Kill on yourself in front of your mirror, because I will personally see to it you spend six months in the best treatment facility in the Wizarding World. The one in Azkaban. You had better be as tough as you used to be, Potter, because you have a lot of fans doing hard time in there. And don't think I won't do it, because I will. Go pack. Now."

"He means it, Harry. He only calls me "Weasley" now when he's really, really, really mad."

Harry seriously considered taking a crack at the old man, and if he had been in tip-top shape then it would have been a fair fight, but in the sorry condition he was in Snape could easily kick his arse, and Harry was pretty sure he'd do it and nobody would be inclined to stop him.

Especially not Ginny, who was a great proponent of the idea that beating the sense into them was the only way you could get to truly stubborn people.

"Okay. You win. All of you. I'll pack."

Snape went with Harry, to make sure he wasn't trying to abscond.

"I've got to hand it to you, Snape. If you would have made this the usual touchy-feely kind of affair I would have laughed in all your faces. And you knew damn well you were me Dad all along. You were married to me Mum, for fuck's sake. Just saving it for the right moment. If I'd been working on a case, that's what I would have done."

"Of course. Everything you learned about the business you're in, you learned from me."

"There's just one more thing. You know that not only does the head of CAULDRON have his offices in an undisclosed location, but no-one under the rank of Lieutenant is even allowed to know his identity. I've always thought it was you. I know the Potions Biz doesn't take up all your time."

"You've got a long way to go before Lieutenant. Let's go." Snape said.


	3. Second Movement

**Chapter 3: Second Movement **

_(Author's Note: Thanks for reminding me, Kat!)_

Out of all of the young heroes of the Second Wizarding War, Hermione's long road to adulthood had been the least rocky.

It was hard to explain what Harry went through, and she, Ron, and Ginny, as his closest friends and allies, went through with him.

They had spent the formative years of their lives, from 10 to 17 embroiled in a very dirty war, the fallout from which mutated them all. Then, after seven years of lies, fear, hate, murder, torture and paranoia, the grateful but fickle world expected them to just pick up and go on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

That was, of course, impossible.

Harry was nearing the end of a long and difficult slog through almost two decades of drug addiction and alcoholism. Ron suffered a nervous breakdown and was in St. Mungo's for two years, off and on. They were married in his hospital room. And Ginny spent a year in Azkaban and was just finishing up ten years of probation for killing Blaise Zabini in his team's locker room.

She beat him senseless in a brutal fistfight, shoved his semi-conscious form into a locker and slammed the door against his head until he stopped screaming.

_Killer Queen Slays Beater Blaise in Locker Room War Score Grudge Match!_

It was in all the papers.

But they were all coming to the end of their sufferings. Harry would soon be completely sober, and he had held down his job and done it well for nearly a decade. Ron wasn't taking medication anymore and he only had one incident that year, after the Creevey case, which brought up so many bad memories. Ginny served her time and, after a two year suspension, went back to playing Quidditch and had a stellar career. She won the Quidditch Cup for England three years in a row, and was seriously entertaining the idea of coming out of retirement, an event for which the whole of Wizarding England was waiting.

And Hermione?

Hermione went to university, graduated at the top of her class, and married her grammar school sweetheart. They divorced, she took a job at Hogwarts and became Potions Mistress. Soon after she remarried her Auror ex-husband and married her former Potions Master in the same ceremony. Then, she and her second husband both left Hogwarts and started their own highly successful business.

Pretty normal stuff compared to Ron and Harry and Ginny.

How she envied them, and their ability to suffer, to endure and to triumph. Such emotions just weren't in Hermione. For her there could be no road back to humanity.

Like Frodo of ancient history, she had been pierced by a blade not steel, and left with a cold wound that would not heal. And she too saw the great wheel of fire when she closed her eyes. It was a cold flame, that gave off neither heat nor light, and she was naked before it, naked and alone in the vast, dead expanse of the cold blackness of space.

Bound upon the wheel of fire.

The thing that kept her up the night of Harry's intervention was what Sev had said about her miscarriages. He had never confronted her about it, but Ron had.

She left her bed with Ron quietly enough not to wake him and crept past the door of her and Severus' room, even though she knew he was awake.

She put on her lab robes over her knickers and went to the factory.

Hermione crept softly past the house elf quarters, and went downstairs into the lab.

Then she lit up the room and started to do some work.

She couldn't get it out of her mind.

Ron told her that if she didn't want any children she should keep up with her contraceptive potion and not keep forgetting to take it and telling him there was no need for a spell because she had taken her potion.

"It gets Snape's and my hopes up and it can't be pleasant for you, all those abortions. I'll bet it hurts."

Knowing that Ron knew made her feel horrible; knowing that they both knew made her feel absolutely desolate.

Did they both really want a child? A son or daughter by blood for one and by law and magical bond for the other?

She supposed they did. Snape wasn't so old for a wizard; he was still a man in his prime and would be alive and well when his child was his age. And Ron came from a huge family. All of his brothers were married and had children.

Every Weasley on God's Green Earth, Severus was fond of saying.

Ginny didn't have any children either.

"Harry's a drunk and a junkie and I'm psycho. Best to keep our genes to ourselves." she said.

But, if Ginny turned up pregnant, Hermione doubted she'd have an abortion. For one thing, Harry and Ginny had more than enough money to raise a Weasley-size family. For another, between the Snape-Prince family on Harry's side and Gramma of the Year Molly Weasley on Ginny's side, they'd have no end of helpers and babysitters. Even Kreacher had been nanny to two generations of Blacks.

No, Harry and Ginny would have the baby and muddle through and come t think of it as a wonderful thing, the way most married people do when they find out they're pregnant.

But Hermione couldn't do it.

Her heart was far too cold.

People liked to think that Severus was cold-hearted and although he was hard-hearted he was anything but a cold man. With the blood of a veela, a satyr, and a Scotsman mixed with the Prince blood in his veins, Severus was full of unruly and fiery passions. Rage, lust, love, sorrow, loyalty, they all bubbled beneath his cool exterior and often erupted violently to the surface.

Hermione, on the other hand, really was cold inside.

It had happened rapidly, in those first few months of celebrations and funerals after the Battle of Hogwarts, the Final Battle. She felt no joy at the latter, and no grief at the former, and, at the time, she had been greatly relieved. It was a kind of peace, then, not a kind of torment.

Most of her feelings slipped quietly away from her, like a balloon slips out of a child's hand. She had serenely watched them float away and was untroubled by their departure. All the remained was her love for her close friends, and for both of her husbands.

She was a very passionate witch.

Lust, however, was alone to warm the grey and icy confines of Hermione Granger's soul. She had her work, and Severus, and Ron, and her friendships with Ginny and Harry and nothing else.

The cold would often take her over so completely that she became like a robot, a work machine. Only Severus could reach her, then. The fires of Hell burnt inside that wizard, but even they, sometimes felt like just a little spark in the cold darkness where Hermione dwelt.

Naked in the dark and bound upon a wheel of fire; cold blue flame that gave off neither heat not light, only the dimmest appearance of either.

There was no love in her heart for a child. Indeed, Hermione knew that someday there would be nothing in her heart for anyone, not even Severus and Ron, or Harry and Ginny.

When she was completely sealed and iced over, she imagined that would bring her something like peace.

Alone at last in the cold darkness, one with the Wheel and oblivion.

"Somebody looks like they need a drink more than I do. Come down and have a cup of tea."

Hermione was shocked out of her reverie by Harry's voice.

It seemed to be coming from underneath a dusty old crate in the corner, one that was not big enough for her to hide under, let alone a man Harry's size.

"I'm hearing things." Hermione muttered.

"No you're not. Just lift up the crate and come in."

"What?"

"Remember the little door in Alice in Wonderland? The one that became a big door. It's like that. Just say the password. It's 'Wicked Old Screw'." Harry's voice explained.

Hermione gave the crate the password, and lifted it up.

All of the sudden she wasn't lifting a crate, but a trapdoor, and there were some stairs and she found herself in a cheery efficiency flat, complete with a kitchenette and a little bathroom.

Harry folded the divan back into its sofa form, and put the kettle on the cook-top in the kitchenette.

"Is this some kind of CAULDRON thing?" Hermione asked.

"No, it's some kind of Weasley thing. George's newest invention. The Weasley in Wonderland SpaceSaver 2000. This is one of George's prototypes, and I'm testing it. Rather nice, actually. And the house elves will all swear up and down to Daddy Dearest that I'm bunking with them." Harry explained.

Hermione sat down on the divan.

"So, tell me what's bothering you. I can keep a secret. It's me job."

She didn't know what made her blurt out everything she had just been thinking to Harry, but, over a pot of tea, Hermione just let it all out.

Harry was in the kitchenette, putting the kettle on again when Hermione let the other shoe drop.

"And I'm pregnant, again. With twins."

Harry nearly burnt himself on the cooktop.

"Again! You should be more careful, Hermione! You're so careful with everything else."

"I don't know, Harry. It's as if sex is the one thing I've decided to be out of control about. And it gets better. According to my gyne-wizard, they're boys. One's Ron's, and the other is Severus'. He says it's a rare thing, but not unheard of. I looked it up. It's called heteropaternal superfecundation, and it affects two in every 50,000 births of twins."

Harry sympathetically poured Hermione a cup of tea.

"I take it I'm about to have a baby brother, then. I suppose you can just call me Uncle Harry to both of them, and make it easier on all of us." He said.

"I can't do it this time, Harry! I've bought the potion, twice, and poured it out. In the past, I did it at three weeks, four weeks. I'm coming up on 14 weeks. They look like people now. I've been having regular visits, and I've been making myself the proper vitamin potions. Soon I'm going to start getting big, and my little invaders are going to start moving. Then it will be too late." Hermione confided.

"It sounds like it's already too late for you, Hermione. You seem committed to going through with it, this time."

"What if I'm a rotten mother, Harry? I just don't feel anything for these babies. I've read all these books and I know how I'm supposed to feel, but I don't. They don't deserve a mother who doesn't have any feeling for them and can't love them."

Harry poured them both another cup.

"I don't know, Hermione. You don't want to have an abortion, you've had regular medical visits, you're taking vitamin potions and you're worried about whether or not you can be a good Mum. That sounds like some feeling to me. And even if you are a rotten mother, they'll have Ron and me dad, and me and our whole family and the whole Weasley family. They'll get on alright." He assured Hermione.

"I suppose it's about time I told Ron and Sev."

"You might want to do that." Harry agreed.

* * *

All that Ron and Snape both seemed to think about over the next seven days was Harry, and his progress into sobriety.

As for Harry, he found that complete sobriety was not as bad as he thought it would be. At WAND, Snape often said that you get a habit as a way of dealing with or compensation for something horrible that happened in your life. Years later, when your time of crisis has past, you still have the habit, and you're afraid to break it, because you don't realise that the emergency is over.

Harry felt like a man who has been in his bomb shelter for too long. He jumps out with a gas mask on and a shotgun in his hands, expecting a post-apocalyptic nightmare, and finds surprised people on their way to go buy a pack of fags or visit the shops giving him odd looks.

No, to Harry, the person having the emergency was Hermione.

As such, he asked her at least three times a day if she had told Ron and Snape yet.

Speak of the devil, Snape was pleased at Harry's quick progress. Although he had threatened to make Harry perform the kinds of tasks they hired day-trolls to do, he relented, mostly because 

Hermione and the house elves had threatened to go on strike, and Ron started waving the labour laws at him.

So, he just put Harry to work in his job from his university days, potions lab assistant.

Considering that Hermione's and Snape's working hours were somewhat irregular, it was as hard a job as he remembered it being.

Some days they didn't go into the lab. Some days they put in four hours. Some days they put in 8, 12, 14 hours, usually working at night. Harry, hwoever was used to keeping irregular hours and no stranger to hard work. And Snape was right, it did keep his mind off drinking.

What worried him was that Hermione rarely waited for anybody to help her lugs her heavy mithril cauldron from place to place, or large sacks of ingredients, or heavy jugs made from thick glass.

"Hermione, why can't you wait, for fuck's sake! Harry and I know you're a better man than we are. If you keep lugging objects around that are almost as big as you are, you'll regret it when you're me age." Snape warned her.

Harry, however, would drop whatever he was doing and have an absolute fit if Hermione exerted herself in any way. He kept encouraging her to take breaks, sit down, eat something, and so on.

Even Treacher noticed when Hermione abruptly left the room when Harry and Snape donned protective clothing in the face of some particularly nasty ingredients for a Scourgifying potion.

"Potter, do you know something I don't?" Snape asked.

"Not unless you're a complete wanker" Harry replied.

"In that case, I expect me brother by law has no idea." Snape rejoined

* * *

In typical Hermione fashion, she dropped the bombshell, abruptly, while they were all having dinner.

"So, ah, I just thought I should tell you lot that I'm pregnant. This is my 14th week." Hermione casually announced, shortly after helping herself to seconds.

"You're what? Pregnant? You are! Really! By the Mother! This is great! I can't believe it!" Ron enthused.

"Of course she's pregnant, Ron! Don't you notice anything? The little vials of pre-natal potions? Seconds and thirds at dinner? The way she's always holding her back like it's killing her? Not to mention a little, oh, swelling around the belly. You're an Auror. I'd think you'd be more observant." Snape corrected him.

"But aren't you excited?" Ron asked.

"Weasley, I am sixty years old. I have been married and widowed and you have met my son, haven't you? I'm very glad about our wife deciding to take the plunge and have a baby. But I'm not going to jump up and down and scream. Now, don't bother Hermione while she's fucking eating! Trust me, any man who comes between a pregnant woman and food is risking serious amounts of GBH to his person." Snape replied.

"Who's the father? I mean, I know we're both the father, you know, but who's the father, technically?" Ron asked as he went back to his chair.

"I'm having twins. Boys, actually. One is yours, Ron, and the other is Sev's. Its' not as crazy as it sounds. Two in every 50,000 twin births are a result of heteropaternal superfecundation." Hermione answered, calmly.

Then, something happened that Harry wished he had a picture of.

Snape and Ron both jumped out of their chairs and started dancing around the room, and slapping one another on the back and so on.

They even hugged.

"Well, Treacher, now I've seen everything." Harry told the house elf.

"Say cheeses!" Treacher announced, and captured the moment, forever with Ron's camera.

"I want a copy of that for me desk at work. And for me living room as well. Shit, I may even wnat a fucking poster for the bedroom wall!" Harry reminded the house elf.

* * *

Hermione spent half of the night with Ron, but when she couldn't sleep, she knew Severus would still be awake.

She found him in the owlery; he'd just finished owling the good news to her in-laws.

"I can't sleep, Sev. Could you make us a pot of tea?" she suggested.

Hermione had two cups of tea before she could manage what she had to say.

She told him all about her fears of being a rotten mother, and the terrible wheel of fire, and the cold.

"Do you understand what I mean, Sev?"

"Yes I do, Hermione. I've been suffering with it all my life. What Winston Churchill used to call the Black Dog. There's only one way around it. You have to fight. This feeling is not your friend; it will break your mind and destroy you. Ron and I will be going to see you at St. Mungo's, feeding you baby food, because you'll end up in a catatonic state. To use your metaphor, you are bound on the wheel of fire because you tied yourself there. Break your bonds, free your emotions; if you have some kind of emotional meltdown people will just shrug and say, well, she's pregnant, it's her hormones. If you feel overwhelmed you can start coming to meetings with Harry and I. I know you're not an addict, but half of us poor bastards are depressed and riddled with anxiety, and suffering from shell shock and so on. Or maybe you need a visit or two with Ron's psyche-wizard." Snape suggested.

"Can you help me? Just you? I don't want everyone in the Wizarding World to know all my business."

"Granger, what do you think I've been doing since you floated out of university and marriage and into my old job at Hogwarts in a dissociative state? If it wasn't for me, you'd have been writing home to Woolton with finger-paints from St. Mungo's a long time ago." Snape snorted.

Hermione had to laugh.

"Severus, do you think we can go home to Liverpool for awhile? I don't want our boys to be Southerners." She suggested.

Snape thought about it. Harry had seemed happier when he and Ginny were living in Liverpool with his family, than they ever did at 12 Grimmauld Place. And they could always move the factory. Not to mention a change of scene might do Potter and Weasley both some good. They could always apparate to work, after all.

"Hermione, that might be a very good idea." Snape agreed.

Hermione suspected from the tone in his voice that Severus had ulterior motives, but she didn't say anything about it.


	4. Third Movement

**Chapter Three: Third Movement**

While Harry was sweating through boot camp a la Snape, Ginny was preparing for her final meeting with her probation wizard.

By the time Harry returned home, she'd be a free woman.

It had been a long way back.

Or maybe a long way there. It wasn't as if Tom Riddle had made her anything but more of what she already was to begin with.

Ginny considered it entirely possible that she was a Bad Seed. She was the only Weasley with a red-head's temper, even when she was a little girl, but it had always been something more than that.

A little something that she always knew about herself that no one else saw.

Almost no-one.

She was glad the hat had sorted her into Gryffindor; she thought she'd end up in Slytherin for sure.

Then again, circumstances had not conspired to redeem her.

It may have been expedient to cast her affair with Lord Voldemort's handsome, teenage simulacrum as a rape, but she had been willing. She was attracted to the darkness in him, the power and promise of evil.

It seemed somehow more natural to her to succumb to evil than to try and be good.

A little something that she always knew about herself that no one else saw.

Almost no-one.

But he saw it, didn't he?

Expedient to call it rape, but it wasn't rape; he was the Devil and he came to do the Devil's business and what he left inside her grew and grew, and she gave birth, on moonless nights, to tiny monsters.

Or that was the way it seemed.

Tom betrayed her, and that taught her some unpleasant lessons. She hardened herself against softness and sentiment; she embraced the heart of darkness that beat within her own breast, and turned her back on pity, charity, and mercy.

A lioness, her animagus form reflected both sides of her nature; to her friends she was valiant and loyal and true, but to her enemies she was a ravenous, pitiless beast of prey. She may not have got her nickname until she started leaving unconscious bodies and victories in her wake on the Quidditch pitch, and the rumours began about her being some kind of Black Widow spook for CAULDRON, but she left the Chamber of Secrets the Killer Queen, just the same.

Perhaps if there hadn't been a war on, voices may have been raised suggesting that something was not quite right about the youngest member of the Weasley clan.

Perhaps if she had used drugs or drank or gotten bad grades, red flags may have popped up. But Ginny was consistently in the top of her class, excelling especially in Charms and Defence Against the Dark Arts, and was a drug-free teetotaller.

And if she seemed a bit brutal, if her love of ultraviolence was disturbing, if she was ruthless and promiscuous and unsentimental, using her Killer Queen groupies as little more than diversions, well, there was a war going on and she was a good soldier, wasn't she?

And speaking of lust, Ginny always thought that she and Harry were a match made in Hell. Everybody who saw them as a golden couple didn't know them for what they were. They both lived a double life during the war; part hero and part villain; in-between valiant battles and dedicated study, Harry drank and got high and they both frequented dives in Knockturn Alley and got into vicious brawls, and when they were not indulging their lust for blood they indulged their lust for each other. It was a hard, instinctual, muscular lust, fucking for the sheer animal joy of it.

To the world they were models of piety and chastity; in truth they were anything but; since they were little more than children their lives had been a mismash of _Naked Lunch, All Quiet on the Western Front, _and _Satyricon_. Harry had an ever greater legion of groupies than Ginny did; she told him that Tom Riddle took her virginity when she was 12 because she let him and Harry didn't seem to care. They didn't measure fidelity in sexual constancy, fidelity was that neither of them shrank from the other, no matter what brutalities and infamies were revealed.

They were bound together by lust and blood, by sweat and semen; for them, that was love.

And then the war was over.

Just over, just like that.

The cruellest joke of all was that they weren't dead.

They had both been living their lives under the assumption that death was imminent, hoping that there was no Hell below us and above us only sky.

But Death had come, and taken who he wanted, and left them behind. All of the sudden it wasn't eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, we die. All of the sudden they had a long future ahead of them, a very long future, almost two centuries more, a future that had to be planned for.

Jobs, bills, book-tours, the lecture circuit, higher-education, a house, children, a kneazle in the yard and and owls in the owlery.

Now they were expected to behave like normal people.

How?

Just who and what had prepared them for that?

Harry got a couple of serious habits, and muddled through the best he could, carrying on with his hard-living, mad, merry, devil-may-care ways as long as he could.

As for Ginny, with her NEWT's and her celebrity, she could have taken up any profession she wanted, gone to any university, but she decided to play pro Quiddicth, not just because she loved the game but because it had always been a wonderful substitute for battle. She played as roughly as it was legal and when she was on the road with the team she got into fight after fight, night after night and bedded down with her admirers sometimes two at a time. At home, she continued to accompany Harry to sleazy dives and on mad errands. They joined a cabal of Magi founded in the seventies by veterans of the First Wizarding War called the Order of the Satyr and lived by the order's maxim, borrowed from a wise Muggle's pen.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

They carried on much in the same way as they had carried on before the war. Victory had been profitable, Quidditch even more so, and they were both unspeakably wealthy, and behaved unspeakably badly. A good bit of their money went to charities for the widows and orphans of the war, and to the veterans program at St. Mungo's, and to Harry's godson, but when you got right down to it, Snape and his family and Hermione and Ron were the ones who raised Teddy.

If either Harry or Ginny felt guilty about bungling Remus Lupin's last wishes, they didn't show it, and even when he was little, Teddy seemed to understand.

Still, shouldn't someone have said something?

But no one said anything until she and Blaise Zabini had their last fight.

He had started it. Every match that her team played against his, he taunted her, and picked fights with her, brought up old unsettled scores from the war, touted Voldemort and spat on her dead.

He might as well have slit his own throat when he said those ugly, horrible things about Fred. Fred was a joke; he wasn't smart enough to finish school; he deserved to die because he was too stupid to live; Ron and George mourned their brother so deeply because they were all screwing each other and they all screwed her. She probably instigated it, the likesof her would have screwed her father as well had he been as much of a degenerate as her brothers were.

It started out as just an ordinary fight but it escalated quickly. What began with fists continued with kicks and the beater's bat; he'd battered her something awful with it by the time she finally got him onto the ground.

The papers said she put his head in the locker and slammed the door onto it until he stopped screaming, but that wasn't true. She'd only slammed his head in the door once and that was an accident; he was still smacking at her with the bat when she got his head in her hands at just the right angle and snapped his neck.

It was the first time in years that she had killed an enemy; the first time in over a decade that she had seen the light rapidly fade from the dying eyes of an unreconstructed Death Eater.

Could she really be blamed, a lioness, for letting out a great roar in exultation of her victory?

Suddenly, then, people began to notice that there was something wrong with the little Weasley girl. All of the sudden she was an ultraviolent psychopath, cracked like an egg from shell-shock and the trauma of battle, someone who had to be institionalised for her good and the good of society.

Had it not been for Luke she was sure she'd still be sitting in St. Mungo's.

Lucius Malfoy had become the poster boy for post-war redemption. His family had, after all, saved Harry Potter's life; the Malfoys had betrayed Voldemort.

After the war he was extremely contrite and above reproach, working tirelessly though his position in the Ministry to ferret out pockets of loyal Death Eaters. As a titled aristocrat he had rarely practised his profession, but he came out of his long retirement and put on his barrister's robes and prosecuted his former comrades zealously.

Off to Azkaban or to the executioner.

Better them than him, after all.

He was made a judge for his troubles.

Ginny thought it was ironic that of all the core of Voldemort's Death Eaters only Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape, his most ardent pupils, not only escaped punishment; they were became heroes.

They were the only ones to truly internalise the Machiavellian lessons that their cruel, and treacherous master had taught.

Luke took time away from the docket and represented Ginny at her trial.

He delivered a passionate defence of his client, painting Blaise Zabini black as the unreconstructed Death Eater he was, and pointed an accusing finger at the entire Wizarding World for "abandoning its wounded saviours, little more than children at the time of their victories, delivering them into the cold hands of fate, which had already not been kind."

It was a brilliant defence. Ron testified to his psychological problems, but the crowning moment of the trial came when an unshaven and unkempt Harry Potter shambled into the courtroom, string out, itchy and twitchy to take the stand and testify that he was a drunk and a junkie, and show his track marks to the jury.

Ginny didn't like to think about that. She'd always loved Harry, but she had never been much good to him, insofar as keeping him out of trouble.

Maybe that was best left to Hermione and Snape.

She could still remember the stir in the courtroom and the horrified looks on the faces of the jury, and the spectators, even the judge.

Luke had to pause before he'd begun his questioning.

"Have you no family, Mr. Potter?"

"No. They all died in the war."

"Who takes care of you, Mr. Potter?"

"My adoptive family, the Snapes and Princes. And the Weasleys."

"What would happen to you without them?"

"I suppose I would die. They try to keep an eye on me, but I always manage to get away and score."

"Have you no refuge, Mr. Potter?"

"Horntail and heroin."

"Have you no hope?"

"That Death will finally be as merciful to me as he was to most of my family and my friends."

"How did you come to this fate, Mr. Potter?"

"The war. Everything was on my shoulders. I saved the Wizarding World. And it turned its back on me. I was just supposed to go on and have a normal life. How could I have a normal life, after doing what I'd done, and seeing what I'd seen?"

"Mr. Potter, kindly show the jury your arm."

That was when Harry rolled up his sleeve and thrust his heavily magically tattooed scarred, black and blue arm with a pus-ringed hole in the crook of it at the jury.

The entire courtroom gasped, almost in unison.

Then, there Luke's closing argument.

Genius.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have met some of the most famous people in the Wizarding World in this courtroom. People you assumed that you already knew before. Harry Potter, university student, the Boy Who Lived to Defeat Voldemort. His fiancée, Ginny Weasley, the Killer Queen, war hero and Quidditch Cup Champion. Ronald Weasley, university student and Harry Potter's brave companion. Both future Aurors, with glittering careers no doubt ahead. Severus Snape, former Headmaster of Hogwarts, War Hero, Entrepreneur. And, albeit posthumously, Blaise Zabini, reformed Death Eater, Quidditch Hero, Tragic Victim. These are the people you thought you knew. But, over the past four months, you came, in this courtroom, to know very different witches and wizards, indeed. You were introduced to Harry Potter, drug addict, alcoholic, college dropout. A desperate, broken young man tormented by the unquiet demons of his past, hoping only for the release of death. Severus Snape, concerned father, a man who has done everything in his power and continues to do so to save the life of his adopted son, the child of his murdered best friend. Ronald Weasley, a victim of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, fighting to regain control of his mind and his life. And my client. Ginny Weasley, survivor. Survivor of a diabolical murder plot in which she and I were both pawns to Lord Voldemort. Survivor of something even worse, in some ways than rape, of her mental and physical seduction by Lord Voldemort, himself, deep in the bowels of the Chamber of Secrets. Survivor of a brutal bloody war in which she lost both her brother, Fred Weasley and her Magus Mentor and Knights of Albion sponsor, Remus Lupin. Survivor of an even more harrowing peace.

And you have also met Blaise Zabini, unreconstructed Death Eater. If any man alive may rightfully condemn him, then let me take that right. I, who sat at Voldemort's right hand, and not as a spy or a traitor, but as a loyal supporter. I have seen the error of my ways, and I have publicly repented and tried to make amends. So have many like me. I will spend the rest of my life making amends for who I have been and what I have done. Let me tell you, then, that reformation is not impossible. It's not a matter of once a Death Eater, always a Death Eater. Unless, of course, that is your choice. And that was Blaise Zabini's choice, witches and wizards of the jury. He chose to keep the flame of his dead master living in his heart; he chose to remain a Death Eater, and martyred himself for his cause; I have no doubt his master, Lord Voldemort has made a special place for him in Hell, with the rest of the faithful. And if his master is in Hell, that is where Blaise Zabini wishes to be; cry no tears for him.

Remember what you have heard from Mr. Weasley, and from my client. These young soldiers grown to disorderly adulthood are your children, and mine. We made them. We trained them to kill. Why should we be surprised when they do what it is that we programmed them to do, since they were 13? Remember that you sleep peacefully in your beds because of the terrible sacrifices my client, and her brave, desperate and doomed companions made.

My fellow wizards and witches, Lord Voldemort was our responsibility. It was the responsibility of those who followed him to see through his folly, and the responsibility of those who opposed him to defeat him, themselves. Instead, we sent our children to do our dirty work for us. Now, they are our responsibility.

My client does not need to be shut away for life in the mental ward at St. Mungo's with the forcibly obliviated and those tortured into insanity. Nor does she need to be packed off to prison for life. You may need to forget that you have seen a wasted, mumbling, shambling bag of rags and bones that used to be Harry Potter, and you may need to forget that your precious Killer Queen is a fractured, violent, emotionally-crippled psychopath. You may need to forget that it was your hands and mine that delivered them into these terrible fates, and that is why you may want to accept no blame for Mr. Potter, or lock my client away. Justice, however, is not about our selfish needs to deny the truth. Justice serves the truth. My client, Ginny Weasley needs your help. She needs to learn how to live all over again. She needs to learn pity, charity, compassion, mercy, and even love. Show her that these are not the empty words that she thinks they are. Set her free, and then, we, as a society can stop patting ourselves of the back for a job well done, and begin, here and now, to rebuild the generation that we have let Voldemort destroy. Let there be no more bloodshed, no more death, no more tragedy. Let it end, here, in this courtroom. With this case. Today."

He got a standing ovation from the gallery, and the judge had to call for order in the court for at least ten minutes.

Snape and Hagrid got the drop on Harry, literally, the latter holding a large sack and the former shoving Harry into it; they spirited him away to rehab, and Harry's first attempt at getting clean.

Ginny found herself sentenced to one year in St. Mungo's, and ten years of probation, with five to ten years of mandatory psychiatric counselling. She would be permitted, if she followed the terms of her probation, to go back to playing Quidditch after she did her time.

Which she tried to shirk, but Luke Malfoy saw to that she attended, rigorously, or he would see to it, personally that she was right back in St. Mungo's, or off to Azkaban. For as Severus Snape painstakingly took the wreck of Harry Potter and reshaped it into a real human being, so Lucius Malfoy did with Ginny.

Their affair spanned the same time as she and Harry, beginning when Malfoy was a prince among Death Eaters and she was a member in good standing of Dumbledore's Army. It had been her plan to seduce him and murder him, but she could not bring herself to destroy the heart of darkness in Malfoy that beat in tune with her own.

Or maybe it was just that her lust for his flesh overcame her lust for his blood.

They had been forged in the same foundry, by the same smith, except Malfoy was 13 when he became Voldemort's lover, and his seduction was by force and not guile.

Unlike Ginny, though, Malfoy endured an entire adolescence of brutality, rape, and the dark seduction of the Dark Lord's skewed cosmology.

Tom Riddle had seen within both of them a fertile ground in which to plant his evil seed, and it lay still within both of them, fostering bitter fruit.

Luke was the only person in the world whom Ginny felt really understood what it was like to be her, how she thought and what she felt. Harry might have been lost to his addictions without Snape, and Hermione to her chilly detachment without Ron and Snape, but without Malfoy, Ginny was sure it would have been her very soul she would have lost; like Blaise Zabini who would never be any deader than he was as she held his rag-doll head in her hands, damned for all time.

She shook her head.

Ginny wasn't usually one to have these dark, philosophical thoughts; that was more Ron's department, and she shook them off with a toss of her extremely long red hair, like she was physically shaking the unusual sensation off of her body.

* * *

Mr. Stickywickett was her fifth probation-wizard, in ten years, eight of which she had been with him. Like most of his kind, he was a nice, well-meaning, ordinary fellow so firmly moored in the very British wizarding world of clean shirts and regular mornings that he couldn't even begin to understand anything about any of his charges.

To his credit, he didn't, therefore, attempt to do so, and limited himself to the behavioural and the observable. If his charges were holding down their jobs, and they were attending their meetings or classes or doctors, and getting on well with their families and friends and superiors and co-workers without falling off the wagon or acting out or re-offending, he was satisfied that they were as reformed as they could be.

He had, under his auspices, all sorts of criminals and thugs and junkies and drunks and madmen and black magi and nutters and crackpots and fools.

Of all of them, Ginny Weasley was doing the best.

She was also the most dangerously psychopathic and violent witch or wizard he had ever worked with. But, she was intelligent, cheerful, and very well-adjusted, so he considered her his greatest success.

It wasn't until he was saying "Good show, see you next week, "that he realised there wasn't going to be a next week, and he was quite distressed, taking off his glasses and moving the stacks of files and parchments around on his desk and the floor so he could get up out of his chair and say goodbye.

"I shall miss you, Ginny. Why, you're almost family to me! What will I do every Tuesday between 12 and 1?" he asked.

"We could meet for lunch at the fry-up next door." Ginny suggested.

"That's a capital idea! Erm, now that you've retired from Quidditch, I don't suppose you'd be looking for a job in the public sector? I'm sure Judge Malfoy could get you into any number of universities of Wizarding law, and you could certainly start out here. Pardon my language, but, you shouldn't be fucking about with children's games when you're a grown witch in her thirties. You may not feel old now, but you're a fall or two off of your broomstick from feeling fifty and perhaps one or two knocks to the head with a Bludger from idiocy." He suggested.

That was the first job opportunity other than coming out of retirement that Ginny had liked the sound of. And Mr. Stickywicket had a point. Quidditch was a young mage's game. If she returned, she'd be the oldest player in the league.

Ginny had played on the England Team with the oldest player in Quidditch history, a Scotsman, Donal MacLaren, of Glasgow. He was interviewed shortly before the Quidditch Cup, bragging that he was 39 years old and had no plans to retire. He wasn't too smart, but he was one of the best Keepers in Quidditch history, and a very nice bloke. One of the best lays she'd ever had, and he was nearly as big as Harry.

He died six months after they won the cup, in his sleep, of what his medi-wizard had told the Daily Prophet was "extremely premature old age". He suffered from two varieties of arthritis, and several elevated discs in his spine, but it was a degenerative brain and nervous-system condition caused by the 706 concussions that he received in his lifetime that killed him. The medi-wizards who performed the autopsy said that 150 of Donal's 206 bones had been broken at some point in his life and 50 of them replaced, and that he had the internal organs of a 175-year old. They were surprised he had lived so long, and chalked it up to him being a strong Scotsman with the constitution of a rather large draft animal.

With Harry half in the bag most of the time and flirting with some sordid death due to his alcoholism, dying on the pitch before or just after she reached forty hadn't seemed like too bad of an idea. But, with Harry on the mend, Ginny had finally begun to glimpse a future that didn't end with brutal and glorious death in the near term coming up on the horizon.

"That may be a good idea, Mr. Stickywickett. I'll think about it." Ginny agreed.


	5. Sneak Preview!

PREQUEL PREVIEW! IT'S THE STORY YOU'VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR, EPILOGUE FANS! IT'S… LAST MAN STANDING! .net/s/6462225/1/Last_Man_Standing

**Chapter One: All's Fair In Love and War**

**I: Snape**

_To the Wizarding World,_

_ Fuck you._

_ I, Severus Tobias Snape, being of sound mind and body, hereby declare it._

_ Fuck you._

_ Whether I am dead or not, I have given my life for you, you ungrateful sons of bitches. _

_ Whilst you have sat sitting on your ponderous, and for the most part, Southern, lily-white arses and, depending on what you read in the papers, cringed, howled in indignation, laughed derisively, or simply clucked your tongues and shook your heads, I have been doing your job._

_ I took care of your children while you either denied Voldemort's existence or cowered in fear of him. When it was necessary for me to teach them to kill, I did it. I was the parent none of you ever were, and they all hated me for it._

_ That's how I know I was doing a good job._

_ I gave you everything, you ungrateful bastards._

_ I gave you the woman I loved and the life I might have had with her, I threw her son under the wheels of your hideous machine in the face of your disgusting cowardice. With my own body, my own soul, my own life, I protected him and the brave soldiers like him, your brave and broken children whom you let fight and die while you ran and hid._

_ I gave you the life of the man who raised me, who adopted me as his son. Albus Dumbledore asked me to sacrifice him for your good and I did it. _

_ His blood is on your hands, not mine._

_ I gave you my life, every bit of it, every minute of every hour of every day._

_ You will never know what I gave up for you, for your lovely world of clean shirts and regular mornings. Your world that I have never been part of, and never will be._

_ If I am dead, then with my dying breath I curse you, that the blood of this war's greatest heroes will be on your hands. I curse you that the stain of their blood will never wash off your clothes, the smell of it will never leave your nostrils. You have murdered children, you've taken their youth and their promise and squandered it on blood and war and death. _

_ If it was in my power I would sentence you and your sick, diseased society to suffer, all of you, what they have suffered, but I know that I have no power, that I will die the miserable Scouser fuck born in the muck of the muddy Mersey, no better off than he ought to have been._

_ But, you had better hold onto your sanctimonious bums, you had best raise your faces to the gods and beg them that this old Scouser has not breathed his last._

_ I would have the last laugh, knowing that your fuckers can't make it without me, that your whole world will collapse into shit if I'm gone._

_ But I can't even be allowed that triumph._

_ Because if I am dead, neither Hermione Granger, or Ronald Weasley will live to be the age I am as I write this._

_ And Harry Potter, poor shattered Harry Potter, from whom this war has taken everyone he has ever loved, not to mention his childhood, his sanity, and maybe even his soul, he will not live to see 21._

_ You killed him._

_ You killed all three of them, and every warrior that died before them, with your cowardice and indifference._

_ Now, if I am not dead, and you have read the other papers in this packet, and discovered what a hero I am, well, then, that changes things._

_ Fuck you._

_ Fuck you, fuck your gratitude, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._

_ This is what I want from you._

_ First, I would like all of Voldemort's monies and holdings. I am his heir, after all, and I deserve every motherfucking penny, I have paid for it, in blood._

_ Second, I want you to leave me the fuck alone and let me do what I have to in order to rebuild Hogwarts and make sure that the generation raised during this war do not grow up to be a pack of rabid psychopaths._

_ After the class that were first years during this miserable year have graduated, I intend to retire._

_ Third, leave your precious heroes the fuck alone._

_ They are children. Harry Potter and Ron Weasley are only 17, and Potter has no family. None whatsoever. Hermione Granger is 18, Ginny Weasley is 16._

_ They need to get on with the business of growing up and becoming something other than shell-shocked trained killers. Let them be and leave them to me._

_ Don't worry, I will fix them._

_ I will fix them, and all your children, and your school, and your world, and I will do it in seven years, if you will do just one thing for me._

_ LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE, SHUT THE FUCK UP, SIT THE FUCK DOWN, AND LET ME DO MY FUCKING JOB._

_ Then, I shall retire from public life, move home to Liverpool and you can all fuck yourselves for all I care._

_ Oh, and once more, this time with feeling._

_ Fuck you._

_ Sincerely,_

_ Master Severus Tobias Snape, Master Magus _

_Of All Five Disciplines_

_ Headmaster of Hogwarts_

_ Order of the Phoenix_

_ Head of Slytherin House_

_ Heir to Master Tom Marvolo Riddle_

_ Greasy, manky, snarky old Scouser git._

For the rest of the chapter, and more, beginning the day following the Final Battle, follow the link to the story that made "Epilogue" possible. And, as always, it's absolutely free of charge!


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